From the comments: “America the Beautiful”?

Tyler, Common among economists and some among the autisitic spectrum is the tenedency to belive the map is more real than the landscape, the model complete and accurate and that everything you were taught in econ seminars came donw on tablets. The Candide, America love it or leave it attitude is a tad tiresome. There are problems out there big guy and the Solow model or the Romer Model don’t mean shit.

3. For whatever reasons, smart American women seem to be more insecure than are Western European women. Yes that’s a vulnerable overgeneralization and I will take some lumps for it in the comments but I still think it’s basically true.

4. I could not live in rural America and be happy.

5. America faces a massive current and future problem resulting from the apparent uneducability of a large chunk of its citizens. While I do favor school choice, it’s not just government education which is at fault; many better school systems around the world are government-run.

7. The American culture of individual freedom is closely linked to the prevalence of mental illness and gun-based violence in this country. We can’t seem to get only the brighter side of non-conformity.

8. America is the worst offender when it comes to factory farming and the treatment of animals.

On the brighter side, America has a decent economic track record, the Solow model does matter (try living and earning in countries with poor Solow indicators), America remains the world’s leading innovator, and most Americans — at least those not in prison or on drugs — can expect a bright future. It’s not as if I’m pushing the future economic prospects of Suriname.

I also believe (contra the blogging progressives) that America is fated (for better or worse, but in my view not worse) to remain predominantly captured by corporate interests and that America does a better job absorbing and elevating immigrants than perhaps any other country.

Many Europeans fear deep down that America will have a permanently higher growth rate and that the European way of life will, sooner or later, be forced to disappear. Right now I would bet against this proposition, as I see a new Europe revitalized by intra-EU immigration. But there is still, say, a 30 percent chance it is true and polemics against Uncle Sam are in part a reflection of that deep insecurity.

The number of Americans in prison remains an underreported scandal, as well as the conditions they face.

Prohibition didn’t work in the 1920s and 30s, and it isn’t working today.

I could not live in rural America and be happy.

Since [Hendrick Houthakker] retired from Harvard in 1994, [he and his wife] spent much of their time in Pomfret, surrounded by the Vermont countryside. “My husband loved it,” [Houthakker’s wife] Tymieniecka said. “We spent a life of idyllic adventure because we were doing things that we found fascinating and we were doing it for joy. Pomfret we called our paradise. When we were going back home from somewhere else, he would say, ‘We are going back to our paradise.'”

Speaking from Finland I don’t think anyone in this neck of the woods (the Nordics or even Northern Europe) is insecure that Americans might have a better underlying system than we do. What we fear is that the marketing juggernaught that is America Inc manages to spin GDP per capita figures so that people read them as reflecting a higher quality of life. On that basis we fear a push to follow the US model and see the erosion of things integral to our quality of life – such as liveable unemployment insurance, free at the point of delivery healthcare, low crime rates, a fairly consensual harmonious society etc etc.

Fortunately for us, the US is facing difficulties now that mean it is likely that in five years the GDP gap between our countries will be about 10% rather than 25%. That should be enough to keep the wolves at bay.

Also something I don’t understand: how is American culture of freedom correlated with gun violence? Most gun violence happens in the paternalistic inner city, not the rural South West where the greatest spirit of freedom lives.

If you just mean that America has more gun violence than other countries, OK, but it doesn’t prove that this has anything to do with our spirit of freedom. Nor do I understand the mental illness bit.

“8. America is the worst offender when it comes to factory farming and the treatment of animals.”

Really, more than China? Animals have a hard time here, no doubt, but face it, virtually no one anywhere thinks they deserve consideration. And as a self-proclaimed “foody”, I doubt Tyler is helping matters much. His complaint is disingenuous.

I grew up in rural Montana, and moved to Atlanta Georgia.
I swear to you, when I first moved to Atlanta, I couldn’t find stuff to do. Sure there were a few museums, but aside from that, there seemed to be very little to do in the big city.

Of course that’s rediculous, there’s lots to do in the big city. It just took me time to get used to it. There is one major difference though.

In the city, just about everything costs money to do. In the country, everything is cheap to free.

When I lived in Montana, I entertained myself very well. There’s tons of stuff to do outdoors. If you’re bored in a rural area, it’s your own fault. It just takes a little creativity. In the city, it takes planning and a little time paying attention to what’s around.

I heard Frank Abagnale speak last year and he said his prison experience in France was far worse than his prison experience in the United States. Granted, that was 40 years ago, but I doubt much has changed.

I suspect — without numbers, just an impression from my understanding of the history and the occasional amnesty international report — that France has improved somewhat from the 60s, and that America is a more mixed bag, better in some ways, and much worse in others.

As far as France goes, in the 60s, France was a pretty brutally authoritarian country in a lot of respects. That had probably levelled off by the end of the 60s, but in the late 50s and early 60s, Maurice Papon, a senior bureaucrat in Vichy France, was placed in charge of the police in Paris and behaved pretty much as you might expect a Nazi official to do. People got disappeared, and there were a couple massacres of protestors. I would not be surprised to hear that this kind of attitude towards the population (especially the Algerians and other African immigrants) translated directly into brutal prison conditions. French prison conditions are still reputed to be quite inhumane, but I’m sure they’re better than they were then.

For America, we imprison a lot more people nowadays, and anecdotally, prisons seem to be a lot more violent. My guess is that certain classes of prison are better than they were then, with better facilities and amenities and so on, but that state prisons are worse than they were then. Was there widespread prison rape 40 years ago, for example? Did you have gangs fighting it out right there in prison? Maybe you did — I’m certainly no expert on prison history — but I get the impression that this is a problem that emerged over the 80s and really the 90s, when our prison population skyrocketed.

I suggest you read Julian Simon’s paper on population growth and freedom.

Most of the violence in society comes from socialist families, that is, families where the women and children were raised and supported by the government/welfare state. The children were viewed as economic units which were discarded at age 18. Having been cheated out of a decent education by the public school monopoly, the children joined gangs to satisfy their social and economic needs and usually end up in prison. Without welfare programs, this episode is unlikely to repeat itself in our lifetimes, unless Clinton or Obama gets into the White House.

As far as guns go, some groups of people are shooting each other, so the solution is take guns away from law-abiding citizens?

We use capitalism for efficiency not necessarily ethics. That’s why we have laws. However, I can’t imagine a food producer with sick animals staying in business too long. If it was as widespread as represented, many more animals would be dying.

Hmmmm…large chunks of the U.S population not getting educated? Why does it necessarily have to be blamed on the welfare state. Many Western European countries have a large welfare state and yet they dont suffer from the same problem. I have to say more than anything that large chunks of the American underclass are simply stuck in a rut of ‘bad culture.’

I live in Miami and see it first hand everyday. The same single family kids born into families much too large for their parent’s economic means and guess what? People get left behind and unfortunately this cycle seems as though it will have no end.

‘Ghetto culture’, especially the aimless-non political brand found in the U.S, is really much more awful for society than people want to realize. If criticism of it was not so heavily correlated with racism it would be chastised to a far greater degree than it currently is.

“there are millions of humans today who are quite well adapted for physical labor, can get by in factory labor but do not have the mental or social aptitude to perform well in jobs requiring data analysis, symbol manipulation or other forms of abstract reasoning. Technology is outpacing human evolution and it’s creating real tension. “

Aren’t you unfairly prejudging the abilities of large segments of the human population? and also falsely implying that labor markets cannot effectively utilize human effort?

Many millions of workers in the U.S. and worldwide perform worthwhile labor that does not require “data analysis, symbol manipulation or other forms of abstract reasoning” Among the fastest growing segments of the U.S. workforce is the requirement for low-skilled health care workers. As the U.S. and world population ages, the demand for health care aides will rapidly grow.

Specialization of labor has enabled the mundane tasks of child-raising, food preparation, and hous-cleaning to be transferred from housewives with high intelligence to lower skilled workers.

Millions of mentally and physically challenged workers are fully integrated into our economy. The chief threat to their continued employment is, again, the safety net and such well-intentioned laws as minimum wage and Americans with Disabilities Act.

These are very similar to my feelings about America, with the exception of number 4. I would love it if Tyler could expand more on number 5. Who are these people exactly? Assuming that this population of the “un-educable” includes urban blacks, why does Tyler believe that they are uneducable? Does Tyler believe that on average their brains are smaller than those of whites and Asians? Or does Tyler believe that this is due to cultural influences? Or something else entirely? These are all fascinating questions.

vanya: “there are millions of humans today who are quite well adapted for physical labor, can get by in factory labor but do not have the mental or social aptitude to perform well in jobs requiring data analysis, symbol manipulation or other forms of abstract reasoning. Technology is outpacing human evolution and it’s creating real tension.”

I think you underestimate both the abilities of workers and the needs of the economy.

The U.S. Department of Labor has projected that millions of unskilled and low-skilled workers will be required in the U.S. over the next ten years. Here’s the occupations requiring no post-secondary education which will see the largest growth:

I’m not sure I would go as far to say as certain people are uneducable. Are there people who don’t respond well to the current “education” they receive? Yes. But couldn’t this also be because of a problem with the way this education is being presented to them? I prefer that explanation more than altogether dismissing the capability to learn. I think with the right incentives and approach, most people can and will become educated – it’s just that the education that is forced upon them (via public schools or otherwise) is a often one-size-fits-all approach, causing the square pegs get left behind and give up before its even really begun and they can realize some of the benefits.

And to the person above who claimed that lack of education was caused by our oh-so-generous welfare state, you may want to note that virtually all of the countries that are currently kicking our butts in educational attainment have much more generous welfare systems than we do.

And since I am already bitching – the statement above that “unless you have lived out in the rural South West, you have no idea how much of America lives” would only make sense of much of America actually lived in the rural South West. Turns out that way more Americans live on the coasts, and way more Americans live in cities. So if you want to learn how much of America lives, you should go visit a few coastal cities and forget about the friendly folks in the middle.

I really dislike commenting on other people’s comments, but this strikes me as borderline absurd:
So if you want to learn how much of America lives, you should go visit a few coastal cities and forget about the friendly folks in the middle.

Most people don’t live in poverty, either, so what’s the point of knowing how they live? In fact, let’s just hang out in the suburbs of L.A. or Long Island, since a.) most people live on the coasts and b.) most people live in suburbs.

By the way, nobody actually made the assertion that you should go to the rural Southwest (one word and not actually in the middle of the country) to find out how people live.

Actually the high US prison population is often noted. What is missing far too often is that a huge number of those people are locked up for the alleged crime of hurting themselves, i.e. for drugs.

Prohibition doesn’t work, never has and never will. legalization, in addition to being far more humane, also has the virtue of radically cutting the urban murder rate much the same way that violence dropped radically in the US after Prohibition of alcohol ended. Liquor stores owners don’t shoot each other up for market share, and neither will drug purveyors shoot each other up over market share when drugs finally become legal.

America doesn’t have a gun problem or a prison problem per se, it has a prohibition problem.

Also it is worth noting for those who assume that the US has higher crime rates than in Europe, that the crime rate in the US is lower than in the UK. If we could manage to end drug prohibition our rate will be radically lower, especially our murder rate. It will also make cities far more liveable in the US and work to at least partially change some of the negative aspects of our urban culture.

The Inductivist says blacks have lower rates of mental illness than whites.

John Dewey, you could point to evidence in support of your argument (like gains in SES that preceded the Great Society programs) rather than simply calling an idea disgusting as if that settled anything.

TGGP: “John Dewey, you could point to evidence in support of your argument (like gains in SES that preceded the Great Society programs) rather than simply calling an idea disgusting as if that settled anything.”

I was just giving my opinion about an idea I find offensive, not trying to “settle” anything.

Some of my relatives have devoted years of their lives educating impoverished folks in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), in Barbados, and in poor urban and rural areas of the southern U.S. I am confident that none of these relatives would agree that any group of humans on this earth is “uneducable”.

Your suggestion makes sense. If I have time, I’ll find evidence to support my argument in one of Thomas Sowell’s books this evening.

No. 2 works pretty well for me. I could not live in the country and be happy, cause I am not white, and regardless of yourself and the people you know, racism is openly rampant in small America. I am saying this as someone married to a white girl from a small town of 20 in the Midwest. And if you aren’t white, you have no clue at all how bad it is, my wife can’t even believe how different it is every where we go. It is everything from people crossing the street to avoid you to being seated in the backs of empty restaurants to every other possible slight imaginable… don’t even think for one second that if it was white people being locked up in prisons at the rate blacks are for nonviolent drug possession that there would not be an end to drug prohibition.

The uneducability is made worse by the libertarian slogans and hubris of people. They are ignorant, they think they know the answers, and they are proud that they do, in a sort of rabid self-affirming way. I would love to see how often an American would say “I don’t know” compared to the rest of the world…

Then again, I could never live in Switzerland, a country that survives off of illegal moneys to such an extent that they have made banking privacy a part of their constitution. The average citizenry’s willful ignorance of what supports their standard of living is obscene and criminal as much as our tolerance of Bush’s war crimes.

The idea that minorities or any other subsets of the population are mentally or emotionally inferior, and unable to achieve economic well-being without assistance, is just a disgusting attitude, IMO.

Heh. I love that it’s been assumed that’s what he meant. I read #5 and immediately thought of the Creation Museum. People who want to become educated often do, it’s the ones that choose not to be I worry about more.

“5. America faces a massive current and future problem resulting from the apparent uneducability of a large chunk of its citizens. While I do favor school choice, it’s not just government education which is at fault; many better school systems around the world are government-run.”

Please do some reaserch into Direct Instruction in general, and Project Follow Through in particular (large educational experiment)

It is simply not true that the they are “uneducable” its just that most of educational institutions won’t use the methodes that are known to work.

“I’d rather think he referred to the glorification of ignorance that’s spreading once again. When parents think book-learning is for uppity bastards, their children’s suffer.”

This made me laugh. Seriously, some Europeans have way too much time on their hands. “The glorification of ignorance…”. Really? I think you’ve deconstructed the issue using an epistemologically poor method.

Yet it’s not only Europeans. This is just a crappy post. Tyler is usually better than this.

Everyone here is forgetting the main reason why Europeans don’t think highly of nationalism. They saw the outcome of extreme nationalism, which was a series of pointless wars and millions of their sons buried in the ground. And it was all for nothing. I think were learning some lessons of “My country, right or wrong” right now.

And for the people that don’t think the conditions in prisons are that bad, you’re either forgetting about rampant prison rape or sick in the head. Especially since prison rape is something that is frequently joked about and considered part of the punishment. I don’t care who you robbed, but burglary doesn’t warrant being raped.

Conditions in U.S. prisons are arguably better than in most other countries but almost certainly worse than in the Netherlands or the Scandinavian countries.

Eradicating prison rape is not feasible but there are things the U.S. could do to improve the current state of its prisons and jails. For instance, a system where someone arrested for overdue parking tickets or serving a misdemeanor sentence can be confined in the same place as a gang member awaiting trial for murder is naturally going to have problems with inmate violence. When you add that county jails are under the authority of the county sheriff rather than corrections officials, it simply reflects an apathy towards the conditions of people who are guilty of minor crimes or haven’t even been convicted of anything. This institutional arrangement is unique to the U.S. as far as I know.

Putting several inmates to a cell and arranging the cells in a linear cell-block is also a recipe for inmate violence as guards cannot possibly supervise all cells at once. The noise in the cell blocks can be so great at times that a guard honestly might not even know when a violent attack is taking place.

what percentage of violent gun crime is committed by rural white gun enthusiasts, as opposed to young, non-white, city-dwellers who couldn’t care less about gun laws or rights?

i don’t think the guy in a flannel shirt and orange vest in the woods in missouri is the problem. at the same time, i don’t think the gangbanger in chicago is part of the gun culture that tyler and others (michael moore) are talking about.

“8. America is the worst offender when it comes to factory farming and the treatment of animals.”

Sounds like “factory farming,” by definition, is bad or evil. But that is what prejudice is all about, huh? Thank heavens for those factory farms or all those predictions about starving people made a while back would have come to pass.

The statement about treatment of animals is usually made by well fed people with a secure source of cheap food quite removed from the food chain, as are most people today. Being an old man raised on a plantation I guess you never rung a chicken’s neck, slaughtered a cow or butchered a hog.

I suggest you spend a bit of time in any third world country to realize the importance of rural people putting food on the table or the value of “factory farming.

Wow…I think Tyler is a little light in the loafers…man up bro’…you’re not afraid to go out at night by yourself, are ya?…you’ve been living the “high-life” too long. Sounds like you’re a bit nervous about mixing it up with us regular folk. Stop reading so much…go outside and talk to some real people.

I don’t even understand this statement. What culture? I thing you’ve made a serious bias error here, lumping all gun owners in with a very small vocal gun owning population.

I own rap CDs as do you, does that make us part of the rap culture? Is you car pimped with 20 inch blades and hydraulics?

I get the feeling that non-gun owners who have never been around guns much less fired one have an irrational fear of guns and gun owners, tending to overestimate the differences between themselves and those that own guns. Non-gun owners who have been around guns and handled them are usually pretty neutral towards guns, which is why they don’t own one, but they feel comfortable with others owning guns.

“…America does a better job absorbing and elevating immigrants than perhaps any other country.”

I note the comment that Australia wins on that point, but I think Canada could give any country a serious challenge on this. Canada both accepts more immigrants than any nation (per capita) and has a culture of integration and “color blindness”. Unfortunately, on the flip side, Canada competes with both Australia and the US for bottom ranking in regard to its treatment of first nations peoples.

Moreover “Coexist† says “I have given up trying to convince you, and I am now seeking terms†. It responds to the Qur’an’s “pay the jizya† with a resounding “how much?†

I must further add, which I didn’t there, that the gender-equality / LGBT “e” symbol is inherently antiChristian. Jesus in life did not judge homosexuals or, in general, sinners. However Jesus was an observant Jew (apart from claiming to be Messiah); and if he’d abrogated the Torah’s marriage law, we would know it by now. Nobody in Christianity can accept the “e” symbol and remain in the fold.

Universalists believe in “COEXIST” more than they believe in Christ.

It’s interesting that one pro-Coexist poster, Jonathan, noted that his “priest”, an Episcopalian, had one on her car. The Episcopalians have gone Universalist on us.